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Nina Leopold Bradley, “the vision and force” behind Aldo Leopold Center, dies at 93. Nina Leopold Bradley continued the legacy of her famous father—renowned environmentalist Aldo Leopold—but in every sense of the word made it her own. A lifelong naturalist and researcher, she returned in 1976 to the family land where Leopold recorded his observations of nature in the 1930s and 1940s, published as the seminal “A Sand County Almanac” after his death in 1948. Bradley continued those observations, finding clear evidence of how plants and animals were responding to climate changes since her father walked the same land. Her work was published in 1999 by the National Academy of Sciences, “in one of the first published studies that species were responding differently to climate change,” said Buddy Huffaker, executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. “She definitely made her own mark,” he said. “She committed her life to conservation.” Bradley died of natural causes Wednesday at her home on the Aldo Leopold Reserve near Baraboo in Sauk County.

Bradley was the third of five children born to Aldo and Estella Leopold, all of whom went on to careers in environmental work and earth sciences. With her siblings, Bradley was instrumental in the creation of the foundation and later its Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, located on the family land where Leopold worked to restore an abandoned farm to its natural state. It was where they long spent weekends and summers. The family’s ever-so-humble home still stands there—a rehabbed structure known as The Shack—and the only chicken coop listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

As a young woman, she earned a degree in geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and married biologist William Elder. His work took him to exotic places, including Hawaii and Botswana. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1971, she married geologist Charles Bradley, a childhood friend, in a ceremony at The Shack. They later used pine trees planted in her childhood to build their retirement home—and for other special projects including the Schlitz Audubon Center in Bayside. Her husband also became her partner in observing and recording what was happening on the Leopold land, and in training graduate students.

Other survivors include daughter Nina Loeffel; stepchildren Dorothy Bradley and Charles Bradley Jr.; sister Estella Leopold; grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her brothers, Starker, Luna and Carl, died earlier. Bradley’s ashes were be scattered on the land she loved, just as the family did with those of her late husband. by Amy Rabideau Silvers of the Journal Sentinel

Father Thomas Berry died at the age of 94 at his birthplace of Greensboro, North Carolina. His intense interest in nature stemmed from early childhood experiences of exploring fields and woods, including exploring a lilydotted meadow when he was about eleven years old that importantly led to the later insight that “[w]hatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good.” He sought to remove himself from the world when he was twenty by entering a monastery of the Passionate Order of the Catholic Church and taking the name Thomas. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1942 and spent time in post-war Germany and teaching for a year at Fu Jen Catholic University in pre- Communist China. In 1951 he received a Ph.D. with a thesis on Giambattista Vico’s philosophy of history in European Intellectual History at the Catholic University of America. He served as a chaplain in the United States Army in Germany from 1951 to 1954. He went on to teach at Seton Hall from 1956 to 1960 and St. John’s University from 1960 to 1966. From 1966 to 1979, he taught at Fordham University and started a doctoral program in the history of religions, eventually directing 25 doctoral theses. It was here that Berry increasingly began to focus on the relationship between ecology, history, and religion, seeing himself as more as a geologian than a theologian. After spending generations glorifying ourselves and despoiling the Earth, he argued that we need to reinvent ourselves at the species level by moving from cultural coding to recover our genetic coding of relatedness to the Earth and articulate a new mythic consciousness. This new consciousness—what Berry called the “Dream of the Earth” or, more commonly, the “New Story”—would help us overcome our current alienation, cultural pathologies, and destruction of the Earth. Because we are now living in a unique period in which we realize that Earth is part of an irreversible developmental sequence of time—in which we live in both a cosmos and a cosmogenesis—we can enter the new “Ecozoic era” in which all living things and their habitats will be respected and preserved. To communicate the values of the New Story, Berry articulated three basic principles of the universe process: (1) differentiation: the extraordinary distinctiveness and variety of everything in the universe, (2) subjectivity: the interior numinous component of consciousness present in all reality, and (3) communion: our ability to relate to other people and all living things, entering into a new communion with the Earth. The New Story would require great work in economics, education, industry, law, philosophy, politics, and religion as we developed a new worldview with a comprehensive ethics of reverence for all life; all human activities, institutions, professions, and programs would then be judged to the extent that they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship. Although Berry was Catholic, he articulated the spiritual dynamics and contemporary significance of Asian religions and had a long-standing appreciation for the spirituality of indigenous traditions in the Americas and Asia. He argued that human diversity and biological diversity were continuous and should not be merely tolerated but instead esteemed as a necessary condition for a multicultural perspective and a liveable universe. For more about Thomas Berry, please visit: <http://www.thomasberry.org/&gt;. His major works include: Buddhism (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967), Religions of India: Hinduism, Yoga, Buddhism (New York: Bruce Publishing, 1971), The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos, with Brian Swimme (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1992), The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future (New York: Random House 1999), Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on the Earth as Sacred Community, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2006), The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker (New York: Columbia University 2009), and The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 2009).

Deep ecology sociologist Bill Devall died at the age of 70 at his home in Trinidad, California. Originally from Kansas City, he received graduate degrees from the University of Hawaii and the University of Oregon, writing a thesis titled “What is the Governing of a Voluntary Organization: Oligarchy and Democracy in the Sierra Club.” He taught sociology at the University of Alberta for a time before joining the Sociology Department at Humbolt State University (California) in 1968 where he remained for the duration of his teaching career, teaching non-traditional sociology classes on topics such as forestry, radioactive waste, and wilderness. Inspired by the early work of Arne Naess and the poetry of Gary Snyder, Devall co-wrote the 1985 book Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered with George Sessions (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books) that became a classic text of deep ecology. Devall devoted his life to protecting nature in the classroom and in the socio-political realm. He was a founding member of the North Coast Environmental Center in Arcata, California and was locally active to protect the beaches, forests, and natural species of northern California. Active in efforts to protect old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, he participated in Redwood Summer 1990, a campaign funded by the Foundation of Deep Ecology and led by Earth First! to bear witness to and block logging access to old growth redwood forests in northern California. This led to Devall editing the pictorial book Clearcut: The Tragedy ofIndustrial Forestry (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995). For Devall, deep ecology united environmental philosophy and environmental practices. Devall’s and Sessions’ 1985 book DeepEcology, along with Michael Tobias’ edited anthology Deep Ecology (Avant Books, 1983), presented deep ecology to a wider English-speaking audience. Devall and Sessions sought to redirect environmental thinking and action from a shallow, anthropocentric perspective to a deep, holistic, ecocentric perspective that reoriented and reclaimed the environmental movement from a humanistic, resource-conservation, reform position to grassroots actions inspired by deep ecology. Deep ecology was not something brand new but, rather, a reawakening of a very old Earth wisdom that would help us understand the current environmental crisis as crises of character and culture. Devall’s books Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1988) and Living Richly in an Age of Limits (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1993) were further elaborations on the philosophy and practices of deep ecology. With Alan Drengson, he co-edited The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by ArneNaess (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008). As a member of the Arcada Zen Group, Devall was a practicing Buddhist who linked Buddhist principles and practices to environmental thought and practices. His home in Trinidad, California was a congregation point for environmentalists, faculty, students, and other house guests participating in environmental campaigns and issues. There will be a memorial service in his honor at the Universal Unitarian Center in Bayside, California on 10 October 2009, and the online The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy will be doing a memorial issue in his honor in 2010. For more about Bill Devall, please visit his Facebook page.

David Rothenberg, New Jersey Institute of TechnologyArne Naess, the founder of deep ecology, died on 12 January 2009, three weeks before his 97th birthday.

Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess was best known for his invention of the term “deep ecology” to describe the way in which environmental issues are fundamentally questions of ethics and philosophy beneath our science and politics. Through a combination of his ideas and his persona, Naess was probably the most influential living environmental philosopher.

In the 1930s Naess traveled to Vienna as a young student to join the Vienna Circle, working closely with Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap to develop his own take on analytic philosophy. In 1937 Naess became the youngest full professor in Norway’s history, and over subsequent decades he wrote a series of introductory logic and history of philosophy textbooks that became the foundation for reform of his nation’s university system, which required for many years that all students study a semester of philosophy before continuing on to their chosen disciplines. His first book Truth As Conceived By Those Who Are Not Themselves Professional Philosophers (1938) used a survey approach to demonstrate that ordinary people hold a range of views on truth similar to those voiced by the range of philosophers.

During World War II Naess was active in the clandestine resistance against the Nazis occupiers, and after the war he led a reconciliation project to bring war criminals together with the parents of the Norwegian soldiers they tortured and killed. In the Cold War, Naess was asked by the United Nations to lead a philosophical effort to study the worldwide uses of the term ‘democracy’. The resulting book Democracy in a World of Tensions (1951) revealed that the word could mean almost anything, and it was never reprinted, because of this disturbing conclusion.

In mainstream philosophy Naess is most known for his work in philosophy of language in Interpretation and Preciseness (1953) and Communication and Argument (1966). Other majorn theoretical works in English include Scepticism (1968), Gandhi and Group Conflict (1974), and The Pluralist and Possibilist Aspect of the Scientific Enterprise (1969). Naess had always been an accomplished mountaineer, and for a few years in the early fifties he, with his ascent of Tirich Mir, held a record for the highest mountain ever climbed. A decade later, inspired by Rachel Carson, Naess resigned from his professorship to devote his full time to environmental issues. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (in Norwegian 1976, in English 1989, translated by David Rothenberg) was his main theoretical work in environmental philosophy, where the theory of deep ecology is articulated in depth. It was an environmental philosophy, not an ethic, that encouraged each individual to think of nature as the ground of our own interest, so that the greatest sense of self-realization will encompass a “Self” of the environment, and become “Self-realization” with a capital S. We should all situate our identity and our interests in nature uniquely, developing our own “ecosophies” that build on a personal sense of place and duty of care for the Earth and fit into our immediate surroundings with greater attention and dignity.

Together with George Sessions, Naess politicized deep ecology by putting forth a platform of eight points that turn his conceptual idea into an ethical manifesto: 1) The flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth has intrinsic value. The value of nonhuman life forms is independent of the usefulness these may have for narrow human purposes. 2) Richness and diversity of life forms are values in themselves. 3) Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. 4) Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening. 5) The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease in the human population. 6) Significant change of life conditions for the better require change in economic and technological policies. 7) Life quality should be given more primacy than a high standard of living. (8) Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation to implement the necessary changes.

This platform was specifically adopted by radical environmental groups such as Earth First! as their guiding philosophy, but deep ecology may have reached its greatest popular prominence when Senator Al Gore wrote in his 1989 book Earth in the Balance that “we must change the fundamental values at the heart of our civilization” in order to solve global environmental problems. This is deep ecology in a nutshell, and by the first decade of the twenty-first century, the majority of educated people are finally going along with it, even if they may not realize where the idea came from.

In 2000, at the age of eighty-eight, Naess published Life’s Philosophy, a more personal account of his own history through ideas. It became the number one bestseller in Norway, and catapulted its author to a new level of fame in his native land. In 2005 the Selected Works of Arne Naess was published in ten volumes by Kluwer, with the financial support of Doug Tompkins of the Foundation for Deep Ecology. It is perhaps the most comprehensive publication of the works of any living philosopher.

Until his death Naess continued to speak out in the name of free nature and conservation, and he always remained optimistic that humanity will be able to improve our relationship to the world around us “by the twenty-second century.” Through his works and deeds he remains an inspiration to generations of younger environmental activists and philosophers.

At the 2007 annual conference of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, President Anthony Appiah praised Naess’ early work investigating the philosophical views of ordinary people as the pioneering work in what is now the new discipline of “experimental philosophy,” an attempt to make philosophy a more empirical kind of investigation more compatible with social and natural science. So at the very end of his life, Arne Naess’ work returned back to the mainstream of the discipline.

REFERENCES

Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle, translated by David Rothenberg. New York:

He was given a State funeral. The Crown Prince of Norway represented the King at the funeral. The funeral was broadcast on Norwegian national TV because he was considered a national hero in Norway.

Arne Naess was my teacher, in the Buddhist meaning of that term. He guided me.

I discovered Arne Naess while cruising through academic journals in the library of Humboldt State University, Arcata, California in 1975. I participated in Earth Day, 1970, but as I became more deeply involved in conservation activism during the early 1970s, I was more and more dissatisfied with the utilitarian philosophical writings underlying conservation activism. I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, but I wanted more. I found what I was looking for in an essay by Naess in an interdisciplinary academic journal that Naess founded in Norway: Inquiry. Naess’ essay was based on a talk he gave at an international conference held in Bucharest in 1972. In the essay, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary,” Naess contrasted the shallow ecology movement which is concerned with pollution and resource depletion and the deep ecology movement which is concerned with diversity, complexity, autonomy, decentralization, symbiosis, egalitarianism, and classlessness.

I began to correspond with Naess at the University of Oslo. Naess responded to my typed letters with handwritten notes written on small pieces of paper. In later years I would send him emails, and his wife, Kit Fai, would respond to me via email. During the years that Alan Drengson and I were editing The Selected Works of Arne Naess, especially Volume X, Deep Ecology of Wisdom, we had extensive email exchanges. We discussed explorations on the unities of nature and cultures based on revising various versions of Naess’ essays as his ideas evolved based on his continuing reflections on various topics. We met face to face in Australia when we attended conferences on environmental philosophy and political activism.

Naess became my teacher. When I told him I was depressed because the green movement was always on the defensive, never achieving significant political victories, he reminded me that all great social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement, have many years of defeat before significant victories. When I complained about the complexity of living in industrialized societies, he gave me the koan “simple in means, rich in ends.”

I enjoyed listening to Naess talk in person. His quiet voice and his ability to reflect on his own experiences provided insights upon which I reflected. One time when Naess and I were traveling on an overnight train in Australia going from one academic conference to another, I asked him about his life in Norway during the Nazi occupation of World War II. Hitler kept about 500,000 troops in Norway throughout the war because he thought the allies would invade Europe through Norway. Naess said he wanted to be part of the resistance, but friends convinced him to remain on the faculty of the University of Oslo. He was in close contact with members of the resistance, and he said that a few times, arms passed through his office at the university. The resistance in Norway provided the allies with information on troop movements and other German activities in Norway.

After the war ended, Naess was asked to lead a group of Norwegians who were given the task of bringing together Norwegians who had been tortured during the war with Norwegians who had tortured them. The goal was to bring about reconciliation. Naess was very interested in nonviolent direct action and especially in Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence in the progress of society

Naess constantly from the early 1970s through the 1990s sought to develop and clarify the bases of the deep ecology movement. While camping together with philosopher George Sessions in the California desert, he wrote a ‘platform’ for the deep ecology movement. Naess suggested that many people coming from different religious and philosophical traditions could generally agree with the statements in the ‘platform’, and when they realized their common agreements they could work together for social change.

Naess asserted that he was not a philosopher, but he lived philosophy. He acted in the world and reflected on his actions in the world and actions of other people and nature. He demonstrated his approach through his actions at Tvergastein in the mountains of southern Norway. He wrote about his long relationship with the mountain in his essay “An Example of Place: Tvergastein.” He describes his intimate relationship with plants, animals, snow, and the simplicity of writing inside the hut he built on the mountain. He used minimal amounts of wood to stay warm. He developed his own ecosophy while living in the hut over the course of many years. He called his philosophy Ecosophy T after the name of the place that became his Place. He travelled the world encouraging other people to develop their own ecosophies because diversity and deep questioning were major aspects of his teaching. He knew that thinking is difficult.

I was deeply involved in activism concerning the protection of old growth forests in the Northwest region of the United States, and I was constantly helping activists ask deeper questions about Place and protection of Place based on nonviolent principles. Naess encouraged me to develop my own ecosophy. Working with the koan he had given me, I developed an expression of my ecosophy in my book Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology (1988).

Naess continued his talks and travels through the 1990s. He said he was an optimist for the 22nd century. He was especially interested in talking with young people, encouraging them to move beyond shallow environmentalism to ask deeper philosophical questions. Many college students he met were particularly depressed about climate change and the failure of national leaders. Naess encouraged young people to become leaders in the peace, social justice, andm green movements of the 21st century. He said that all people have the “intuition of deep ecology,” and spending time outdoors helps to bring forth what Rachel Carson called a “sense of wonder” that sustains and enriches our lives.

Many of the central ideas he developed as an environmental philosopher are included in the anthology of his writings, Ecology of Wisdom, edited by Alan Drengson and myself (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008).

Naess encouraged dialogue and wide experience. When Alan Drengson and I worked on The Selected Works of Arne Naess, Volume X (Springer 2005) I had the opportunity to reread many of his writings and to ask him questions to clarify my understanding. Naess continued to rethink and rewrite essays based on his dialog with other people and his wide experiences.

In my estimation, Naess was one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, and in a Buddhist sense he was an amazing teacher. He was my teacher, and each time I reread one of his essays I again rethink my own ecosophy and political activism.

Alan Drengson, University of VictoriaMy memories of Arne Naess invariably include feelings of being blessed to have known him personally, and not just to have known his work as a philosopher, activist and scholar, which by itself is so impressive and inspiring.

Whenever I think of Arne, I reflect on his gentle and considerate way of being in the world. In all the years I knew him, in all the circumstances I shared with him, no matter how challenging, Arne was always positive and upbeat. I never once heard him bad mouth other philosophers or people with whom he might have disagreed. He believed we all deserve respect and he lived this philosophy.

He was truly a lifelong seeker (zetetic) who, like Gandhi, sought the truth but did not claim it. He considered respect for others and nature of utmost importance, and because of his vast knowledge of languages, cultures, worldviews, religions and personal lifestyles, he was never judgmental of others. He knew from his scholarly work, from his far flung travels and wartime experiences in Norway, that we can never be sure we understand each other. Our daily languages are not so precise that we can be certain we are communicating. Hence, the importance he placed in being nonviolent in our communication in all our relationships.

His first major work was on Interpretation and Preciseness, which involved not only analytic studies but also empirical studies of semantics. He never stopped doing these studies throughout his long life. He also never stopped spending time almost everyday in free nature. He lived much of his life at his beloved Tvergastein, his mountain hut in Norway. The mountains truly left their imprint upon him, as he became great by being small (modest). He attributed his long life partly to his old father, Mt. Hallingskarvet, the mountain where his hut is located. In climbing circles he showed us to be modest and never think of the mountains as something we conquer.

We all have, he believed, a sense for the world as a whole, once we are mature. He called this sense for the whole a total view meaning complete or whole. We can never adequately articulate any more than a fragment of this sense for the world as a whole. Moreover, if we are truly alive, our sense of the world and our participation in it is a work in progress. Total views, then, are not totalizing, but they are whole in the sense that we can say what we feel and think about new questions. When we share fragments of our whole views with those of others we enrich our sense of the world, our views are enlarged and changed.

We are not only our thoughts, feelings and attitudes, but also our actions and our relationships to others and the natural world. We should never put our views above respect for others, even when we think we don’t agree about something that is of critical importance to us. Philosophy should not be debate but true dialogue, an attempt to learn from each other, to clarify our own understanding and to improve our ability to articulate our values, and what we believe about the nature of the world.

As a result of his vast empirical and other studies, Arne was hopeful and had great confidence in ordinary humans to act with wisdom and insight. He found through his empirical studies that ordinary people have complex and deep views about all manner of subjects. He was a person who truly believed this and acted accordingly. We should treat each person with great respect and we should seek dialogue not debate. Whenever he was criticized in open discussion, he never responded in kind. He never belittled or put down the opposition in various political situations related to social justice, peace and ecological responsibility. He lived his philosophy of nonviolent direct action and approached each person as a potential friend and ally to work with to create a better human world at both the global and local level.

Now that Arne is no longer in contact in person, via phone or email (the latter through Kitfai), I keep seeing him in all the places we were together. He is still a friend and inspiration whose equanimity was truly amazing and whose joy in small things is inspiring. From cutting firewood, walking in the forests, climbing mountains and philosophical seminars, Arne seems to be at hand. I shall never forget spending time at Tvergastein, when he took my family of five, including our three young daughters, to the top of Mt. Hallingskarvet. As we approached his hut, he came to greet us and wanted to be sure we did not step on a number of small plants he had been looking after. He took us to the summit so we could look at the Jotunheimen, the highest mountains in Norway, even though by looking at the sky he knew they would be shrouded in clouds. When we reached the summit he suggested we visit his Eagle’s Nest, a small cabin perched on the edge of the overhanging cliffs on the southern face of Hallingskarvet. I asked him why he built it. He said that it was a dream and a vision. He wanted a hut that was like an eagle’s nest so that when you looked out you would have a feeling of awe and the need to fly. Being in the hut certainly gave me these feelings.

He was a Gandhian in being nonviolent, but he was not submissive or weak. He was always gentle. He loved interacting with children and was playful. He developed Gandhian boxing and tennis. He reflected on the principles of nonviolent communication. He saw that it is necessary to train vigorously and rigorously for climbing, philosophy and activism.

He had an amazing sense of humor and was always saying things that were very funny. He always had a gleam in his eyes. Once when I went to San Francisco for some meetings, I got out of the limo on a steep hillside street. When I started to cross the street to go to the offices where the meetings were held, I heard someone holler “Alan!” It was Arne coming down the hill with a pair of crutches. He was using them like ski poles to do little jumps, bounding around. He had been injured seriously in a fall and had to be on crutches for a while. I asked him why he was still using them, when it did not appear he had any disability. He said that he realized how much fun they could be once he started using them. Also they helped him to keep up his arm and hand strength. It reminded me of a time when we cut firewood in the Oslo forest. We walked to the forest from his home and carried the wood we sawed by hand in packs. He would not let me take the heaviest pack because he was recovering from a serious back injury. He said “My back loves the heavier pack.” We had a great time walking in the forest and sawing some wood quite some distance from his house. He lived a very modest and frugal lifestyle in the mountains and in the city. He gave a percentage of his modest income to charity every year.

One of my last memories of Arne was when we went walking in a hilltop park (Songnvatn) in the forest surrounding Oslo. Kit-fai took us to the park and lake in a car and let us out. We were on our own to walk and to get back to their offices at SUM. Arne and I started to go around the lake on the main trail. The whole park in the areas close to the road was filled with people of all ages, school classes, scout groups, old people, middle aged, children, and people in wheelchairs and on crutches. Arne was using two walking poles that he liked to have in the longest setting. He was trucking along in his 90s, and while we were walking he was talking and interacting with everyone. It was like a great big party. He would stop and talk with the school classes and with people in wheelchairs, everyone. Everyone was so excited and cheerful! We had a great time! When we finally got around the trail more deeply into the woods, he would stop and just stand and listen to the wind high in the trees, he would say “music!” When we gotto a small brook we also stopped for quite a while to listen to the brook’s solo. It was a wonderful walk on my last visit to Oslo before he died.

My last visit to Oslo described above was to celebrate the publication of the Selected Works of Arne Naess (SWAN), which had taken us over ten years to bring to publication. We learned when working on it, that the reason we could not find the English translations quoted from Greek, Latin and other languages in standard works, was because Arne had done the translations from the originals himself. He was a scholar of antiquities and obscure subjects as well as a logician, philosopher of science and always the mountain man and lover of being in free nature. He lived with the utmost intensity, enthusiasm and joy even in small things. All of life was an incredible adventure for him. He was never boring. He found new journeys every day. He loved diversity of every kind and delighted in learning new philosophies, music, cultures, languages and also discovering the great treasures in the world of free nature. He said that the 21st Century would be difficult, but he was very optimistic about the 22nd Century. He never wavered in his support for social justice, peace and nonviolence and the deep ecology movement. Such was Arne Naess, a mountain whose spirit lives on amongst all who were blessed to know him.

Anna Drengson, University of Victoria: Memories of Arne NaessArne had a peaceful presence within him, and a love for life like no other person I’ve known. After my father introduced us at Arne’s home in Oslo, Norway, Arne picked me up and put me on his knee. I was very young, but he listened to me in a way that made me feel important, and showed he cared about what I had to say. I looked up at him, and he asked me if I knew how to box. I said yes! And we began to spar. After the match, Arne took me outside to his garden and told me where the wild strawberries grew. I hunted through the weeds on my hands and knees until I found a small sparkle of red. The berries were tiny, but contained an explosion of sweet flavour.

During my family’s stay in Norway, Arne and Kit-Fai invited us to spend time with them in their mountain hut Tvergastein. While we were at Tvergastein Arne and our family went to the summit of Mt. Hallingskarvet. I will never forget how easily Arne (then 85) climbed the face of the mountain leading us on the way to his sacred Eagle’s Nest, a tiny hut high on the cliffs above Tvergastein. I hiked along behind until we reached the small hut built on the edge of the rocky cliffs. The perch looked out over mountains and valleys; a quiet sanctuary among the clouds. Although we were 76 years apart, we played together unfazed by this difference in age. Arnem always carried a mischievous smile, and his eyes glimmered with a sense of humour that was child-like and easy to relate to.

When Arne last came to our house in Victoria, he was barley through the front door before he was on the floor rolling around wrestling with our chocolate lab puppy Hazel. I can remember later taking Arne by the hand and leading him into our back yard. I keenly wanted to show him how I could climb the thick trunk of our family’s plum tree. Before I had gotten to the top, Arne was scampering up behind me. We giggled while we imitated chipmunks among the top branches, and laughed as we traded secrets on the way down. I feel blessed to have spent time with Arne. His wisdom has touched me in many ways. He truly appreciated every thing around him. He radiated a joyful glow wherever he went. He taught me to play the piano with more emotion, how to chop kindling for the fire, and that Norwegians don’t have to eat their vegetables to be strong and live long!

Mari Lund Wright: Strange Encounter with Arne NaessIt was a lovely sunny fall day on the beach in Santa Barbara, California, in the late 1930s. A Norwegian girl, a student named Gro, and I were lying on the sand, talking about her studies in philosophy. Suddenly, a gangling guy appeared, big-nosed and buck-toothed, with a huge smile and utterly mischievous eyes. He was an older friend of Gro’s named Arne, and a university teacher from Oslo. He joined us and we talked and laughed and joked for a couple of hours. Gro had to leave for a class, but we stayed on for awhile, thoroughly enjoying each other.

When we left the beach he took me to the Art Museum. I was only 18, and not very knowledgeable about modern art, but Arne was wildly enthusiastic about it. In fact, he seemed to be that way about everything. We lingered a long time in front of one painting, “The Cat’s Whiskers” by Joan Miro. It was enormous, covering almost the whole wall. The squiggle lines of a large, beige cat head filled the painting. It had coal eyes, a red nose, and long black whiskers. I was so fascinated by this child-like image hailed as “great art” that I copied it as a signature for years—with my name trailing off the end of one of the whiskers.

After this enlightening artistic adventure with Arne, he invited me to dinner. I went home and changed, but when we met at a simple restaurant he was still in jeans and his beach shirt. We ate a hearty meal, continued our bantering and joking—the long forgotten. It was such a harmless meeting, and I was not at all attracted to this older man, though he was fun to be with for awhile.

However, he did make a shocking impression on me at the end of the meal. “Mari, I don’t have any money, could you please pay for our dinner?” I couldn’t believe my ears. I was utterly shocked and discombobulated as I looked in my purse to see if I actually had enough money. Fortunately, I did. But what if I hadn’t? Would we be sent out to the kitchen to wash the dishes? Would we be thrown out on our bottoms? Or—would the police be called in?

Perhaps Arne was just kidding—to see how I would react—but that never occurred to me at the time. I was an innocent little Midwesterner staying with friends in Santa Barbara before starting university in the spring.

Arne said he would pay me back the next day, and I certainly hoped he would, as I had no extra cash. I was working in Woolworths, behind the chocolate counter, having a grand time weighing out chocolate pieces for eager, smiling kids, and sneaking a bit for myself, too. Instead of balancing the brass scale I let it sing with a clang, as the bright little faces beamed up at me— and I at them. I had been warned against this a couple of times by the store manager. On the other hand, I did bring in a lot of business, and there were always many kids and moms buying chocolate from me.

Such was the situation when Arne arrived the next morning with a big smile. I could see that all the mothers and children wondered who this creature was. He did not exactly fade into the scenery. He handed me a wad of money with the words: “I hope this is enough for last night.”

When I realized the import of his words—and saw the shocked faces of my adult customers— I blushed to high heaven, my face turning beet red. Arne just stood there grinning mischievously.

David Orton, Green Web: Remembering Arne Naess (1912-2009)

“By and large, it is painful to think.” — Naess

“The movement is not mainly one of professional philosophers and other academic specialists, but of a large public in many countries and cultures.” — Naess

“The earth does not belong to humans.” — Naess

I never met personally Arne Naess, the Norwegian eco-philosopher, who, according to an Associated Press story, died on Monday January 12th. He was 96. I knew from a fairly recent contact from his wife, that he was in a nursing home and not very well. Naess—like a few others now dead, such as Aldo Leopold, Richard Sylvan, John Livingston, and Rudolf Bahro— profoundly influenced me with his ideas. His deep ecology writings helped orient my life as a green and environmental activist. His Earth-centered ideas and overall philosophy also influenced so many others. His life’s work and his death will be thought about by those who have been inspired by him and now learn that he has returned to the Earth.

Social relativism, i.e., not taking a stand, was unacceptable to Naess in this age of post modernism and ecological destruction. He himself had seen the impact of fascism on Norway during the Second World War. He saw the deep ecology philosophy, with which his name has become associated, as completely anti-fascist in orientation. Speaking of “intrinsic value,” a basic component of this world view, Naess said: “This is squarely an antifascist position. It is incompatible with fascist racism and fascist nationalism, and also with the special ethical status accorded the (supreme) Leader” (Selected Works, Volume Ten, p. 95). Naess was an advocate of non-violence but made it clear in his writings, that if a choice had to be made, he preferred violence over cowardice. He also saw that self-respect for an individual was important, before a principled nonviolent stand could be taken and the consequences accepted.

I had received a few personal letters and communications from him, about some essays which I had written and on various theoretical points/disputes which I had raised. These letters I have kept and treasure. Arne had an ability to bring out the positive in any clash of what could seem to be contending views. His unifying personal interactive style was very different from that of the late social ecologist Murray Bookchin, whose intellectual life was marked by many rancorous arguments, as Bookchin policed the interpretations of his works.

Naess came through in his writings not only as a deep thinker—and sometimes as an obscure writer—but also as someone who was gentle, humble, and yet mischievous and playful. He told us “that the front is long,” meaning, as I interpreted this, that there are many paths to a deep ecological consciousness, many battles for participants to engage in, and that we should be tolerant and supportive of all those on the path to a new Earth consciousness—no matter the particular field of engagement. He also stressed, that for environmental activists, the views of opponents should be presented honestly and not distorted. We knew through many stories, that Arne, as well as a philosopher, was also an environmental activist, a boxer, and climbed mountains in Norway and around the world. He did much of his thinking and writing in isolation, at a self-built work hut high on a Norwegian mountain, where life’s necessities: water, food, shelter, warmth, clean air and perhaps solitude—what he called in his philosophy human “vital needs”—came into much sharper focus. (Naess advocated decreasing the material standards of living in wealthy countries.) There was quite a mystique around him. On top of all this, he was part of a privileged Norwegian shipping family and thus born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Yet, for Naess, one had to walk the talk: “Ordinary people show a great deal of skepticism toward verbally declared values that are not expressed in the lifestyle of the propagandist” (Selected Works, Volume Ten, p.110).

Naess had a way of expressing deep insights which would remain with one long after reading them. He concluded one letter to me in December 1996, about an apparent dispute I had with him on what I saw as his inconsistent views on so-called sustainable development. He wrote: “Industrial societies cannot be reformed, green societies will not be industrial, but they may of course have industries. We probably have some real disagreements, but let us get rid of ‘pseudodisagreements.’” An e-mail in 2000 commented positively about something I had written against wildlife biologists, who in the name of research, routinely subjected wildlife to various technological/electronic tracking devices, thus violating their species being and dignity: “Personally I believe that mysteries will not gradually disappear with increase of research efforts. If you throw light on an area, the boundary of darkness increases.”

Deep ecology, as conceived by Naess, made room theoretically for others to participate. A quotation which expresses this is in the 1993 book by David Rothenberg, Conversations With Arne Naess: Is It Painful To Think? (p. 98): “To be a great philosopher seems to imply that you think precisely, but do not explain all the consequences of your ideas. That’s what others will do if they have been inspired.”

In my own case I was inspired like so many others and came to critically adopt, and try to apply and propagate the deep ecology philosophy, starting in 1985. My involvement in forestry and wildlife struggles in the late 1970s and the early 1980s in British Columbia and Nova Scotia had brought me to a position which made me open to Naess and ready to critically embrace his ideas. This was quite some time after 1973, when Naess published his initial deep ecology synthesis, the now widely reprinted article “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary.” This article was based on a talk he had given a year earlier. It eventually was to transform itself into the eight-point Deep Ecology Platform, but how to change this Platform so it can evolve and yet keep its movement legitimacy remains unresolved. Giving support to this Platform, which calls for significant human population reductions, has come to identify the typical follower of deep ecology. Naess, “to provoke,” had called for a world population of 100 million people (Selected Works, Volume Ten, p. 270).

The distinction between “shallow” and “deep” ecology made by Naess, although perhaps an invidious comparison which some have called self-serving, nevertheless became a signature and part of the language of ecophilosophy and radical environmentalism. In fairness to Naess, he saw these two terms as “argumentation patterns” and not applied to people (Philosophical Dialogues: Arne Naess and the Progress of Ecophilosophy, p. 444). What is being called for in this age of ecology is that individuals need to define their “selves” as being part of the natural world. Naess defined the shallow ecology movement, which he says is more influential than the deep ecology movement, as “Fight against pollution and resource depletion. Central objective: the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.” The shallow approach takes for granted beliefs in technological optimism, economic growth, and scientific management and the continuation of existing industrial societies. Naess expressed it this way: “The supporters of shallow ecology think that reforming human relations toward nature can be done within the existing structure of society” (Selected Works, Volume Ten, p. 16).

Naess defined the “deep movement,” which seeks the transformation of industrial capitalist societies who have brought about the existing environmental crisis, by putting forward seven main points. The article is only a few pages long, but profound and showing the complexity of Naess. He pointed out that biological complexity required a corresponding social and cultural complexity. Outlined is an “anti-class posture” and how anti-pollution devices can, because of increasing the “prices of life necessities” increase class differences. He stressed local autonomy and decentralization.

Fred Bender’s 2003 book The Culture Of Extinction: Toward A Philosophy Of Deep Ecology said that Naess, in his initial 1972 formulation of shallow and deep ecology, put forward a very progressive non-dualistic approach, which is the one most compatible with ecology, where every aspect of Nature is interrelated—“all my relations” as traditionalist aboriginals say. Naess also presented in the original essay a sophisticated understanding of cultural diversity and a class and political consciousness. If this had been retained by Naess and other deep ecology academic writers in published writings, it would have blunted all that criticism of deep ecology, much of it emanating from social ecology—that deep ecology was just focused on Nature and had no view of society.

Some supporters of deep ecology (I am among them), believe that this philosophy has “stalled.” One example of this is perhaps the elimination of the section on deep ecology in the fourth edition (2004) of the undergraduate reader, Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, senior editor Michael E. Zimmerman. This edition has totally dropped the section on Deep Ecology, edited by George Sessions, which was part of all previous editions. Naess, a European, had a positive yet critical attitude towards socialism in his writings. “It is still clear that some of the most valuable workers for ecological goals come from the socialist camps” (Ecology, community and lifestyle, p.157). Naess tried to combine revolution and reform: “The direction is revolutionary, the steps are reformatory” (Selected Works, Volume Ten, p. 216). Most of the academics in the universities who aligned themselves with deep ecology, however, came to terms with industrial capitalism. They did not see themselves as revolutionaries with a mandate to help usher in a NEW social formation as an alternative to industrial capitalism. The academy has tended to politically neutralize deep ecology.

The year 1973 not only marked the publication of the above seminal article by Naess, but it was a time which marked the opening of a deep crack in the paradigm of ruling ideas justifying the despoliation of the planet, and the start of a movement towards an Earth-centered ethics. Other essays and books which were published around that time included Richard Sylvan’s (then Routley’s) essay “Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?,” Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation” essay, and two important books: Christopher Stone’s Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights For Natural Objects and Donella Meadows et al. The Limits to Growth.

Naess was pre-eminently a teacher. At 24 he had his Ph.D. in philosophy, and by the age of 27 he was given the Norwegian University of Oslo’s chair of philosophy. There he remained until resigning at age 57 in 1969 to become the brains and soul of the emerging world-wide radical environmental movement influenced by the philosophy of deep ecology. Naess said that “The main driving force of the Deep Ecology movement, as compared with the rest of the ecological movement, is that of identification and solidarity with all life.” The primacy of the natural world is considered an “intuition” by Naess and is not logically or philosophically derived. Naess would say that “Every living being has an equal right to live and flourish, in principle.” This is not to deny that our existence as humans involves killing living beings. Living beings for Naess included individual organisms, ecosystems, mountains, rivers, and the Earth itself. The most comprehensive published overview of the philosophical work of Naess (there are said to be over 700 published and unpublished papers), can be seen in the ten-volume Selected Works Of Arne Naess which was published in 2005. (See my “Critical Appreciation” at: <http://home.ca.inter.net/~greenweb/Naess_Appreciation.html&gt;.)

Naess had a social harmony view of social change which seemed to stem from a position “that ultimately all life is one—so that the injury of one’s opponent becomes also an injury to oneself” (Selected Works, Volume Five, p. 26). I think he was wrong on this social harmony perspective. The conflict model of social change, which has its roots in Marx and has been developed, among others, by fellow Norwegian Sigmund Kvaløy is far more appropriate for combating ecocide and social injustice. From a basic social harmony position, Naess derived rules of movement conduct for activists, of literally turning the other cheek for environmental campaigns which can seem bizarre, but also dangerous, for someone like myself: “It is a central norm of the Gandhian approach to ‘maximize contact with your opponent!’” or “Do not exploit a weakness in the position of your opponent.”

The significance of Arne Naess, whatever the real or apparent contradictions, is that his nonhuman centered philosophy offers us a way forward out of the ecological and social mess that threatens to overwhelm all of humanity and wipe out many of the plants and animals which share the planet with us. It is unfortunate that environmental “stars”—for example, here in Canada David Suzuki, Elizabeth May and Alberta environmental writer Andrew Nikiforuk, or in the United States, Al Gore—have nothing to say publicly about the importance of deep ecology, and why it is crucial that activists should study Arne Naess and apply his thinking to their work for ecological and social change.

A true defining star is not undermined by acknowledging those who have gone before and from whom we need to learn. Thus Naess acknowledged the importance of those who have gone before and influenced him, like Rachel Carson, Gandhi and Spinoza. (Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring was, for Naess, the beginning of the international deep ecology movement, although he invented the name as well as provided the philosophical framework.)

Ultimately the significance of the life of Arne Naess is that his philosophy has presented a needed pathway for coming into a new, yet pre-industrial old, animistic and spiritual relationship to the Earth, which is respectful for all species and not just humans. This is the needed message for our time, that the Earth is not just a “resource” for humankind and corporations to exploit.

I would like to close by expressing my personal condolences to Arne’s wife Kit-Fai Naess, as well as to the family and close friends. Arne Naess has impacted many lives and shown the necessary direction to significantly change societal consciousness away from humancenteredness and towards Earth-centeredness. Deep Ecology expresses what should be our relationship to the natural world in the 21st century. This is a wonderful and lasting achievement for a person’s life. January 14, 2009

Morten Tønnessen, Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia: An Ageing GiantIt is hard to summarize what Arne Næss has meant to me—first of all because he has been so decisive in forming me as a practicing philosopher. For years I had difficulties seeing where, at all, I would disagree with him (a problem I have now to some extent overcome). I was early on inspired by his interpretation of Gandhi’s political ethics—that’s how I made the leap from activist to student of philosophy. As is the case for so many Norwegians, it was his work that introduced me to philosophy. A course in deep ecology at Åkerøya in Norway in the late 1990s was central in giving me a more solid basis for eco-philosophical reasoning (a couple years later Knut Olav Fossestøl, another course participant, and I founded the “Eco-philosophical colloquium” at the University of Oslo). By then Arne was already a familiar face for me as a philosophy student—30 years after he retired as professor, he was still around offering public lectures. In 2001 and 2003, I arranged public events with him myself. By 2003, however, it was clear that this brilliant mind struggled to remain intellectually alert and coherent. A request to partake in a proposal (concerning the Norwegian Petro-fund) from the Green Party of Norway, for which I was the national secretary at the time, was therefore revoked.

I interviewed him a couple of times. After the Åkerøya seminar I sent him my first booklong philosophical manuscript, Dialog. He had agreed to comment it, but now I got it returned, with an exact explanation: “372 pages!” I never knew whether to call him Arne or Næss. Despite having met him around a dozen times, he never appeared—with certainty—to recognize me (I wish he had). Today I have the fortune of being in contact with some of his closest colleagues at the eco-scene. The last time I was in contact with him (through Kit-Fai) was in 2006, when I was conducting a survey of attitudes in the Norwegian environmentalist establishment—partly inspired by his own little survey on attitudes to nature among Norwegian bureaucrats and others carried out a generation or so earlier. As I heard the news of his death, I pondered home to our house in Magé, Brazil, where we were at the time, and stepped into our outdoor swimming pool, as the day darkened. A couple of bats joined me. I retreated to a corner, offering the two nocturnal creatures (ecological!) space enough to rejoice undisturbed in their playful bath.

Lisa Kretz, Dalhousie UniversityMy exposure to Arne Naess’ genius is through his work in Environmental Philosophy. His writing is provocatively insightful, and his vision is perpetually inspiring. He manages— seemingly effortlessly—to write with clarity on overwhelmingly complex issues, all the while infusing his work with humour and poetry.

Naess’ introduction of the concept of the ecological self to Western philosophical discourse was nothing short of revolutionary. He recognized that humans’ very selves are constituted ecologically (Naess 1987, 35). Through conceiving of the human self as necessarily ecologically formed and necessarily implicated in relations with other ecological entities Naess fundamentally revised the moral landscape. His legacy will live on through the ecologically sound ways of being he advocates, through the activism his work motivates, and through the continued development of his research projects. He inspired me not only to be a better philosopher, but a better person. Naess, Arne. 1987. “Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World.” Trumpeter 4: 35-42.

Joe Rasmussen, Long Beach City CollegeWhen I first learned about Deep Ecology and Ecosophy T, I knew that my world would be changed forever. Arne Naess blended some of the philosophical beliefs that are most near and dear to my heart into a comprehensive, radical new paradigm of thought regarding humanity and our relationship with the rest of the universe. The extreme notion of biocentrism, for me, is the paradigm shift that we need to strive toward in order to reach the higher level goals we have as a global human society. Although people are clearly not ready for this paradigm shift, it takes genius pioneers like Arne Naess to pave the way toward the future. As with many people, his ideas will hopefully become even more popular now that he has moved on to the next adventure. We owe him much gratitude and respect for his profound insights into the human experience.

The environmental philosophy community mourns the loss of Val Plumwood, 68, who died from a stroke on February 29, 2008 on her property near Braidwood outside Canberra, Australia. She was buried at home on Plumwood Mountain on March 30th in a ceremony conducted and attended by many friends.

She was born Val Morrell on August 11, 1939 into a poor family that ran a poultry farm near Sydney. She studied philosophy at the University of Sydney in the 1960s. In the 1970s she was a prominent member of a group of philosophers at the Australian National University who formed the first wave of Australian environmental philosophy, arguing that environmental problems stemmed not merely from faulty policies, practices, and technologies but from underlying human attitudes toward the natural world that were built into western thought, including the anthropocentric idea that only humans mattered morally and that people had no obligation to protect nonhuman nature for nonhuman nature’s sake. When she married her second husband, philosopher Richard Routley, she became Val Routley. Together they wrote a number of important treatises in environmental ethics, including: (1) The Fight for Forests, 3rd edition (Canberra: Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1975), (2) “Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future,” Inquiry Vol. 21 (1978): 133-79, and (3) “Against the Inevitability of Human Chauvinism,” Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century, edited by Kenneth E. Goodpaster and Kenneth M. Sayre, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).

The Routleys divorced in 1981, and Val became the sole inhabitant of a stone house she had built with Richard in a temperate rainforest in southern Australia. Through her experiences in living here as a member of a congenial, more-than-human community, she acquired a deep knowledge of nature that became legendary. She changed her name to Val Plumwood from Plumwood Mountain—the location of her home—that in turn was named after the plumwood tree.

Plumwood was an independent scholar and took intermittent teaching positions at a number of places, including Macquarie University, University of Sydney, Murdoch University, the University of Tasmania, North Carolina State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Montana. The Australian National University awarded her a Ph.D. in 1991. She was also an important environmental activist, and in the 1970s and 1980s had been instrumental in an environmental campaign to save rainforests in eastern Australia.

Plumwood famously was attacked by a crocodile while she was canoeing alone through Kakuda National Park (Australia) in 1985. After three crocodile death rolls in the water, she escaped with horrific injuries and crawled for hours through tropical swamps before she was rescued. In the article “Being Prey,” she wrote about this experience. “Being Prey” has been reprinted in The New Earth Reader: The Best of Terra Nova, edited by David Rothenberg andMarta Ulvaeus (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999).

Much of Plumwood’s environmental philosophy was focused on analyzing, critiquing, and providing alternatives to dualisms that she believed lie at the heart of the domination of women, nature, and others. The division between mind and matter that supposedly set humans apart from nature became refined into an opposition between reason and nature in the western tradition. This in turn informed many categories of thought and created an ideology of dualisms that rendered that which came to be associated with nature as inferior to that which came to be associated with reason. This ideology was used to legitimize the domination of many subjugated social groups, including women, people of color, the working class and the poor, colonized peoples, indigenous peoples, and nonhuman nature. This led to the central ecofeminist insight that struggles for social justice and environmentalism cannot be separated.

In her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), she developed a feminist critique to argue that the master form of western culture’s rationality was unable to acknowledge its dependence on nature, women, and other dominated groups of people that were constructed as inferior; this rational distortion shaped the basic categories of western thought and threatened the survival of people and nonhuman nature. In her book Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002), she argued that distortions of reason and culture created dangerous forms of ecological denial that—through economics, ethics, politics, science, and spirituality—gave us an illusory sense of our independence from nature that made us insensitive to dependencies, ecological limits, and interconnections; she drew from democracy, feminism, globalization, and postcolonialism to develop an alternative dialogical interspecies ethics and materialist spirituality of place. In addition to these two books, a sample of her many articles includes: (1) “Ecofeminism: An Overview and Discussion of Positions and Arguments,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy Supplement to Vol. 64 (1986): 120-38, (2) “Women, Humanity and Nature,” Radical Philosophy Vol. 48, no. 1 (1988): 16-24, (3) “Do We Need a Sex/Gender Distinction?,” Radical Philosophy Vol. 51, no. 1 (1989): 2-11, (4) “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism,” Hypatia Vol. 6, no. 1 (1991): 3-27, (5) “Ethics and Instrumentalism: A Reply to Janna Thompson,” Environmental Ethics Vol. 13, no. 2 (1991): 139-49, (6) “Plato and the Bush: Philosophy and the Environment in Australia,” Thinking Vol. 9 (1991): 39-46, (7) “The Politics of Reason: Towards a Feminist Logic,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 71, no. 4 (1993): 436-62, (8) “The Ecopolitics Debate and the Politics of Nature,” Ecological Feminisms, edited by Karen J. Warren (London: Routledge, 1994), (9) “Androcentrism and Anthropocentrism: Parallels and Politics,” Ethics and the Environment Vol. 1, no. 2 (1996): 119- 52, (10) “Wilderness Skepticism and Wilderness Dualism,” The Great New Wilderness Debate, edited by J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), (11) “The Environment,” A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), (12) “Intentional Recognition and Reductive Rationality: A Response to John Andrews,” Environmental Values Vol. 7, no. 4 (1998): 397-421, (13) “Paths Beyond Human-Centeredness: Lessons from Liberation Struggles,” An Invitation to Environmental Philosophy, edited by Anthony Weston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), (14) “Integrating Ethical Frameworks for Animals, Humans, and Nature: A Critical Feminist Eco-Socialist Analysis,” Ethics and the Environment Vol. 5, no. 2 (2000): 285-322, (15) “Animals and Ecology: Toward a Better Integration,” Food for Thought: The Debate over Eating Meat, edited by Steve F. Sapontzis (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004, (16) “Toward a Progressive Naturalism,” Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice, edited by Thomas Heyd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), (17) “The Concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture and Agency in the Land” Ethics and the Environment Vol. 11, no. 2 (2006): 115-50, and (18) “Journey to the Heart of Stone,” Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism, edited by Fiona Becket and Terry Gifford (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).

At the time of her death, Plumwood was a visiting fellow in the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. She was working on some publications regarding death at the time, including “Tasteless: Towards a Food-based Approach to Death” from the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment (October 2007) that can be found at: http://valplumwood.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/tasteless.doc.

A son and a daughter from Plumwood’s first marriage predeceased her. “Remembering Val Plumwood: A memorial site to honor the life and work of Val Plumwood” can be found at: http://valplumwood.com/.

J. Baird Callicott, University of Northern TexasI confess that I was a little afraid of Val Plumwood. She was formidable and not just in regard to her personality. She was a formidable intellectual. I did not know her personally well at all. I often call Holmes Rolston “the dean of environmental philosophy,” and he certainly deserves that accolade. Long before Val’s death, however, I also often said that she was the best philosopher in the community of environmental philosophers—the best among us in the twentieth century and so far the best in the twenty-first. She was a master of what I think of as the Australian philosophical style: conceptual clarity, conceptual creativity, and a leave-nostone- unturned, leave-no-inference-unarticulated approach to exposition and argument. The initial news of her death indicated that she wanted to be remembered less as the intrepid outdoor adventurer who was attacked and nearly killed by a saltwater crocodile, or the eccentric recluse whose best friend was a wombat, but most of all simply as a philosopher. That’s certainly how I will remember her.

Yang Tongjin, Vice-President of the Chinese Society for Environmental EthicsMy colleagues in the field of environmental ethics and I are very sorry to hear that Professor Val Plumwood, the leading ecofeminist and an active environmentalist, has died because of a massive and sudden stroke. I, on behalf of the Chinese Society for Environmental Ethics and my colleagues, would like to express our deepest condolences for the death of Professor Val Plumwood and our heartfelt sympathies to her relatives.

Val Plumwood is well-known in China for her profound criticism of the dualisms and rationalism in cotemporary environmental ethics. Her analysis of the dualisms of western philosophy is particularly inspiring for Chinese scholars. Her classic book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, through my efforts was translated into Chinese, and she had been very satisfied with this Chinese version of her book. Two of her papers were also translated into Chinese: “Against the Inevitability of Human Chauvinism” and “Wilderness Skepticism and Wilderness Dualism.” Professor Plumwood’s writings have and will continue to be a positive influence on environmental ethics studies in China.

Before her death, I discussed with her the possibility of translating her book Environmental Culture into Chinese, and she had expressed her intention to visit China this year when she finished her academic activities in South Korea. There is a good chance that Environmental Culture will be translated into Chinese, but now it becomes a forever unrealized dream for Chinese scholars to meet her.

Robert Melchior Figueroa, University of North Texas: “A Day on Plumwood Mountain”Upon first hearing of Val Plumwood’s death, I was absolutely shocked, emotionally paralyzed, and then angry at the possibility that this was an urban myth spread by internet hooligans. The spectacle that the “crocodile woman” had been taken by a spider bite was the justification for my anger, not because a spider bite was so out of tune with her famous croc escape, but because the day I spent on Plumwood Mountain in the (Australian) late spring of 2005 involved countless encounters with spiders strewn across the rainforest. Val and I hiked her mountain for hours like we were crossing properties of the English countryside. Nearly every few feet we came across a web of a poisonous spider in our path and like the gates of country fences, she would simply detach two leading spars of the web, spider unbothered, and swing the web out of the way, reattaching it gently to the next available branches. She must have done this a hundred times during our philosophical hike, so the thought that a spider of all things had done her in, was unimaginable in my brief experience with her.

She taught me a few other tricks to get around the critter-healthy world of “her” mountain. How to remove the leeches from my legs after the hike; pull them off, ball them up by rubbing your hands together, and flick ‘em. Wish I knew that a month before when the suckers ruined my hike with my family (partner, two-year old, and infant). How to collect bright blue items, flowers, feathers, pieces of plastic from groceries, and give them to the bower bird who decorates her nest with these items. First time I saw one of those bowers on a college campus, I thought it was an art student’s installation. How to make a pact with the wombat to trim the lawn surrounding the house, “It’s a fair contract,” she said, “and it saves on petrol and noise pollution.” She also taught me how one would converse with the many animals all around the place, how to respect the rocks and trees in their own agency, and how to keep the ants from ransacking the house and food stuff by simply placing a bowl of sugar in one of the cabinets. Before that, I was convinced Australia was a big ant hill that humans mistakenly took for dry land. The ant feeding was clean and fair, and echoed David Abram’s opening chapter of The Spell of the Sensuous. I remarked this to her, and we shared our deep admiration for that book in lengthy conversation.

Of course, Val had the last word on it, “I love it, but you know he’s wrong.” “I know, Val, I know!”

Our agreement wasn’t in thinking he was really wrong, but we knew that both of us would put oppression of the Other as the origins of the West’s separation with nature before we would locate the cause on the origins of the technological determinism of the written alphabet. I doubt Abram would disagree, since he admits it’s a series of causes, actually.

I went to Plumwood Mountain for two key reasons: 1) I’d avidly read her work and taught her two masterpiece books in my classes; most recently Environmental Culture in a seminar on Political Ecology and Environmental Justice at the University of Wollongong (UOW). 2) I needed insights on the agency of rocks, since I had been writing a lot on environmental justice and moral terrains with a geographer at UOW, Gordon Waitt. We were centering on the normative conflicts of Anangu values and ecotourism at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. Plumwood regarded me with warm appreciation as “a reader,” though I felt like she treated me like a good friend and a comrade in philosophy. And, I think she was slightly suspicious of my authenticity regarding alternative forms of agency. Initially, I couldn’t help feeling she was also putting me through a few initiations before she could trust me.

First, when we met at her gate, she stopped her car a few meters in and said she had to remove some Scottish thistle (musk thistle), and since it was in a swampy region of the rainforest I was welcomed to stay in the car. As if! After all, I’d wrestled with these creatures working for Boulder Open Space a season on the Integrated Pest Management crew. Musk thistle, I knew. Swamps, I knew from growing up in the New Jersey swamps and pine barrens. She didn’t have her gloves, so I showed her how to remove these invaders from their roots, where thorns give way to smooth shoots. And, then we both traipsed through the swamp with clear knowledge of where solid ground lay. Then I told her about my experience discovering the expanded range of the rare and endangered orchid, Spiranthes diluvialis, among the wetlands of Colorado’s Front Range.

“Orchids! You favor orchids do you?”

And, further into the swamp we sloshed as she showed me the beautiful, majestic, and extremely miniature “flying duck orchid” (Caleana major). There it was, a perfect image of a mallard landing in water like some old Disney documentary, on the head of a very small stem, waiting for us to admire. We must have spent the next twenty-minutes figuring out what this would really be named by the aboriginals who inhabited this place, and what it could have meant in their “Dreamtime.” We much doubted it would have been named “flying duck,” but I’m not quite sure why we were that certain.

And regarding the intentionality of rocks, the agency of rocks and trees, that was worth serious exploration. Rocks. She (and Richard, I presume) built that incredible octagonal rock house of hers from the boulders that littered the mountain. (Maybe “littering” is always bad?) After our lunch and the house tour, she showed me her other rocks: The broken heart rock, the eological transformations that lead to the different vegetation and animal speciation, and the rock-lore of Dreamtime stories. Finally, we went down the escarpment to the plumwood grove, down by the stream that she somehow piped uphill with only the stream’s pressure to feed her house-water. The plumwoods thrive on the life of the palms, they seed about five feet up on the palms, and then they grow. Not unlike the giant strangling fig trees that choke victims until they grow with the wildest of spirals. Figs and Plumwoods, I liked the sound of that. Plumwood trees can grow at right angles just to give room for the other plumwoods in their community.

“Tell me that doesn’t give us cause to rethink intentionality,” she pointed.

We were standing in a grove of plumwoods no younger than 10,000 years old, no thicker than the palms they absorbed, and I wasn’t sure how exactly to cognate her sense of “intentionality,” nor how to disagree. You have to see it to accept it, I suppose. And, you need to get over consciousness and sentience as the basis for intentionality. We agreed on that.

We talked until the light dimmed and the road to down the mountain would have become fatal. We discussed at length the analytical meanings of “intentionality” and “agency,” and we agreed on the viability of those meanings. She as a trained logician, me as a trained analytic, not as a means to legitimate our philosophical savvy, but to recognize the multiplicity of meanings that “intentionality” and “agency” could take. And, how much further we could philosophically understand the world if we did not restrict agency from those who speak in a different voice.

Among the trees, spiders, wombats, bullfrogs, bower birds, and rainforest, we agreed, we were right, and they were right.

Chaone Mallory, Villanova UniversityI am very saddened over the news of Val Plumwood’s death. Reading her article “Nature, Self, and Gender: Environmental Philosophy, Feminism and the Critique of Rationalism” early in my graduate career gave me that “aha” moment that led to the main argument of my M.A. thesis, ideas I continued to work through in my dissertation, and that are still ongoing for me in the form of articulating a field that many, especially Plumwood, contribute to, that I think could be termed “ecofeminist political philosophy.” Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) was a pivotal ecofeminist text that showed many skeptics the depth and scholarly acumen of ecological feminist philosophy. While I was doing my M.A. work, and beginning to explore philosophical ecofeminism, Baird Callicott told me that he considered Val Plumwood to be the most rigorous environmental philosopher of the time. The rethinking of our philosophical heritage and traditions she calls for in her work, as well as Plumwood’s own positive contributions to philosophical inquiry, have absolutely altered how we understand the relation between gender and the history of philosophy, have changed our ideas about how to do philosophy and what it is for, and of course have spurred us to re-think our relation with the more-than-human world. Needless to say, her work has been an inspiration to me, and many, many others.

I never had the privilege of meeting Val Plumwood personally, although I had heard from those who knew her that she had incredible stamina as a hiker, was deeply loyal to her friends, and took no guff. She was scheduled to appear in North America at the Canadian meeting of the Society for Women in Philosophy (C-SWIP) this coming October; I had hoped to have a paper accepted so that I would have the chance to meet her, or at least hear her, in person. I deeply regret that I will now never have that chance. Instead there will be the inadequate (but fitting) substitute of a panel on Plumwood’s work held there, which I am honored to be a part of, but certainly will be no match for hearing what she herself would have said, no match for hearing a living legend.

Her works always appear on my syllabi regardless of the class, because she was so prolific, and the range of her work is so broad: Plumwood is an environmental philosopher, political theorist, feminist philosopher, and cultural theorist. If you want to hook students into thinking seriously about our ethical relations with non-human animals, show them compelling ways to perform feminist analysis on cultural narratives, as well as just plain read a riveting piece, just assign “Being Prey,” the story of her famous crocodile attack, and subsequent re-affirmation of her vegetarianism! Strangely, it so happens that when news of her death was announced, her last book, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason was the very next text I had assigned in my graduate seminar, “Gender, Nature, and the Political.” Of course our reading was very poignant, especially the last chapter on a materialist spirituality of place.

Perhaps those of us so admiring of Plumwood’s work and life can take comfort in these words she wrote there: “Since these communities of nature live on after an individual’s death, a satisfying form of continuity for the fully embedded person may be found in the mutual lifegiving flow of the self upon death back into the larger life-giving other that is nature, the earth and its communities of life. Some may feel they need more: for me, this recycling is enough.”

Michael Paul Nelson, Michigan State UniversityLike all of us I greatly admired Val’s work. I was also fortunate enough to meet her a few times at conferences and share the stage with her. Through those meetings my admiration for her work extended to her as a person. She was playful and raucous, hard nosed and sharp witted. A few years back she and I were both on a panel at an environmental history conference in North Carolina. I walked into the big room where our session was to be held and up to the front where she was sitting looking over her notes. I sat down next to her and said hi, she looked over at me with a big smile and said, “Oh hi Michael, are you here to apologize for your book,” I roared and responded “not for the whole book, just for the last essay.” She roared in response. She was referring to The Great New Wilderness Debate––the last essay was hers, one she wrote especially for the book.

Probably best known to the world as a pioneering skiier of the American west, LaChapelle was also a pioneering voice of deep ecology, joining Gary Snyder, Arne Naess and others giving shape to deep ecology in the 1960s. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Denver University in 1947, she began a life-long career related to skiing as an instructor at Aspen. In 1950 she made the first ski ascent of Mt. Columbia, the second highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, and the first ski ascent of Snowdome, the hydrographic apex of the continent. Her books include Earth Wisdom (1978), D.H. Lawrence: Future Primitive (1996), Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep (1992), Deep Powder Snow: Forty Years of Ecstatic Skiing, Avalanches, and Earth Wisdom (1993). In the late 1960s, Snyder became one of the founders of deep ecology, along with Arne Naess, Bill Devall, George Sessions, Dolores LaChapelle, Alan Drengson, Michael Zimmerman, Robert Aitken.

"Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?" —Henry David Thoreau